Valentina Rozas-Krause

Valentina Rozas-Krause received her PhD in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an architect with a master's degree in urban planning from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her field of study encompasses architecture, urbanism, and landscape from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular research and teaching interests in memory, postcolonialism, preservation, public space, social justice, and gender.

Dr. Rozas-Krause's research directly addresses historical inequalities based on race, ideology, and culture. In its essence, her scholarship is about how minority groups strive to be heard, respected, and recognized by a dominant majority. During the past ten years, she has worked with memory and human rights activists, and survivors fighting against past and present racism, bigotry, prejudice, and antisemitism in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and San Francisco. Her research sheds light on the role that materiality, art, architecture, and urban design can play in shaping communities, and increasing our sense of belonging to the world and to our past. Among the many things she has learned from this experience is that collective memory, and in particular memorialization, are critical tools to deepen justice, diversity, and inclusion.

Current Work:

Valentina Rozas-Krause is currently working on a book project titled "Memorials and the Cult of Apology," which examines how contemporary memorials have come to embody more than memory. It begins with a simple observation of the growing demand for apologies across the globe and the related proliferation of memorials that aim to atone for past injustices. In effect, apologies are being materialized into memorials, a phenomenon of global importance, which presents a major shift in national self-representation. As the first scholarly work to address memorials as apologies, her research builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, of their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects built apologies produce. Since memorialization is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, her work incorporates methods, readings, and theories from a vast array of humanistic disciplines, particularly postcolonial theory, Holocaust and human rights scholarship, and debates about justice, recognition, reparation, and morality.

Research Area Keyword(s):

Architectural history, public space, memory, apology, human rights, activism